Paradigms for Mobile Agent-Based Active Monitoring of Network Systems

Abstract

We present here the design of a framework for building future generation network monitoring systems using mobile agents. It is designed to support dynamic configurability, extensibility, active monitoring, and secure operations.The policies for monitoring and information filtering implemented by agents can be modified remotely and dynamically. New event types and their detection procedures can be inclemently added in this system, and any desired event data aggregation policies can be defined using the publisher-subscriber model. The use of Prolog-based logic databases provides high level and easy-to-use abstractions for defining and detecting new events based on correlation of lower level events. Active monitoring in this system is supported by the incorporation of trigger rules that cause detection of an event to be initiated when certain other events are observed. The use of Ajanta, a secure mobile agent programming platform, provides the necessary infrastructure for protecting the monitoring system from attacks. We present here a set of experiments that we conducted using this system to evaluate and demonstrate its capabilities.